What happens if you swallow gum? | Hacker News Reader

What happens if you swallow gum?

health.clevelandclinic.org

64 pointsgnabgib64 comments

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A 32-year-old male presents to the hospital with a stomach ache ...

...

... and nothing else happens. - ChubbyEmu

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCKOvOaJv4GK-oDqx-sj7VVg

Nothing, really. It's food-grade plastic and it will come out the other end.

Now, what happens if you seal high-pressure hydraulic oil systems with it? Let's find out! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D1RYVSmuOmc

What if it's chicle, does it differ?

It would be an achievement on itself to find true chicle, the vast majority of chewing gum worldwide is synthetic rubber.

There are several chicle gum companies out there. I forget the name, but I bought some. It comes in pellet form instead of sticks or bricks.

Edit: "Simply Gum" is the company I tried.

Why is the pressure gauge full of liquid? (Presumably water? but why / how?)

Quite the talker there :)

Edit: Got it Shog9, thanks!

Probably not water. Purpose is to dampen vibration, making the needle easier to read and possibly protecting the mechanism a bit. https://tameson.com/pages/liquid-filled-pressure-gauge

My child went through a phase of swallowing a bunch of gum. He got appendicitis. It might have been a coincidence. The article does not mention appendicitis but some of the symptoms are the same as intestinal blockage.

Once during a LAN party (back when those were a thing) I chewed gum for 24 hours straight. Near the end of the 24 hours it quite suddenly turned to dust in my mouth. It's anecdotal of course but I'd be highly surprised if enough gum made it through the stommach intact to cause issues farther down the line if it can't even survive the mouth for any appreciable length of time.

I'm not sure why, but this makes me think of the time before ubiquitous internet, when the answers to questions like this one were much harder to come by.

What I did when I was a kid was swallow every gumball in a carton of gumballs to prove that they couldn't possibly be staying in my stomach for 7 years because nothing else would be getting through.

Narrator: Urban legends say they're still in his stomach to this day.

Science, b*tches!

Before the internet, everyone knew that if you swallowed a watermelon seed that it would grow in your belly. Ipsofacto, if you swallow gum, a gum tree would grow. It is known

Before the internet everything happened in periods of seven years. All the cells in your body would be replaced, your luck would recover from a broken mirror, the bankers would discharge your debt, and missing people would finally be declared dead. It was a much more elegant system than we have today.

Edit: And of course, the seven year itch.

laughs in 7 year data retention, then cries

When I heard the song about kookaburra and where they sit, I damn near shat.

("Kookaburra sits in the old gumtree, eating all the gum nut he can see...")

:- O

I was confusing kookaburra with chupacabra, and I also confused capybara with chupacabra too... and umpires with vampires... being a child was terrifying. LOL

I have had a low grade curiosity about this since the 1970s, so nice to have it definitively answered (tho I'm a bit sad gum is just plastic now). Next up: coke and Mentos, and swallowing sunflower seeds (although really this article answered that one implicitly).

Yes, although the New York Public Library has had you covered since the 1960's: https://qz.com/732086/the-new-york-public-librarys-little-kn...

Ditto

As a kid in the 80s and early 90s I swallowed flavored chewing gum of all kinds all the time. They were one of many beloved candies, and I (literally) ate hundreds, if not a thousand.

Try eating a chocolate while chewing bubble gum. The gum will soon dissolve / break into tiny threads/pieces. It might be rough experience and you may feel like spitting it out.

Happened to me by accident as a kid and I remember asking some cousins to do the same and they experienced the same thing. Unless gums are made differently, it should still work.

Mixing peanut butter and gum.

As a matter of fact, it is a perfect solution for getting out gum stuck in your hair.

It just dissolves.

Another unexpected solvent I found was when I was a teenager working on a gasoline engine. Don't pour gasoline in a styrofoam cup. The gas went right through the cup, like it wasn't even there. Ate a hole anywhere it touched.

My co-workers once told me their experience about caring for an older epileptic patient. Many patients with epilepsy continue to take the same meds for decades if the meds work for them, which means you’ll encounter some ancient drugs.

This patient was ordered chloral hydrate, which is given in liquid form. One of the younger nurses went to give them med in a styrofoam cup, only be shocked that the cup had melted.

Acetone works great too. It's very useful for getting rid of styrofoam from packing because you can reduce several cubic feet of styrofoam to a brick 1/100th the size and then throw that away instead.

And who doesn't like a room filled with that fragrance?

Definitely do it in a well-ventilated area or wear a P100 like anything else. Even "odorless" mineral spirits have a very strong solvent odor.

I actually had the opportunity to try the peanut butter to remove gum from hair once, but my child just cut it out before I could get ready. The beginning of the mullet haircut season. (I was SAHD but with the self-cut hair, my wife (at the time) insisted on an immediate emergency hair cut at some fancy salon place, and the mullet was determined to be the only choice available. The gum was stuck about 2 inches above the bangs, so shortening the bangs to that length was a substantial committment). Anyways, I digress.

> Another unexpected solvent I found was when I was a teenager working on a gasoline engine. Don't pour gasoline in a styrofoam cup. The gas went right through the cup, like it wasn't even there. Ate a hole anywhere it touched.

Isn't that basically how to diy napalm?

Yes, though when doing it on purpose, you try to dissolve as much styrofoam into it as you can to get it closer to being a gel.

Not something to do out of curiosity though, fumes given off while burning are exactly something to be avoided.

But now you have peanut butter hair!

you can get that out with jelly and bread.

Gasoline's abilities as a solvent led to it being used as a dry cleaning agent at one time.

...and its flammability is what lead to the use of chlorinated solvents:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dry_cleaning#History

Yes. But it was effective.

you can sorta-kinda do that with anything with a high fat content.

the fat interacts with the gum base and emulsifiers. the fat also coats the components in a way that reduces likelihood of re-amalgamation.

Right, any oil and gum.

Haha, yeah I did that exactly once. Turned into a horrible goo.

With the new gums being synthetic plastic and waxes, I wonder what effects there might be from things like microplastics.

Market it as a microplastic cleansing product...

What's amazing is how, if you chew a piece of gum long enough, it suddenly breaks down. All of it, at the same time, into bitter-tasting, mealy soup of gum particles.

Confirmed. In my teens I'd leave my gun on the bedpost for multiple nights. And yes, at some point after days of chewing it does suddenly disintegrate into a sea of bits maybe max one millimeter long.

*gum

You ever shake cream to make butter? It happens suddenly in q similar but reversed way

Maybe once? But when making whipped cream, the onset of the firmness tends to be rapid, and if you whip too far, the onset of butter likewise.

Well, Timmy, the gum goes on a magical journey of adventure and discovery, earning its MBA to become a middle manager in the marketing department.

Some day I hope they will research how it feels to chew 5 gum.

Ever since that xylitol study came out, I've stopped chewing gum

And what study are you referring to?

Probably this one [1]:

> Xylitol is prothrombotic and associated with cardiovascular risk

In simpler terms [2]:

> Cleveland Clinic-Led Study Links Sugar Substitute to Increased Risk of Heart Attack and Stroke

[1] https://academic.oup.com/eurheartj/advance-article-abstract/...

[2] https://newsroom.clevelandclinic.org/2024/06/06/cleveland-cl...

Sad to learn that gum used to come from tree resin, but is now made from synthetic material.

Are we really aware on the long term what changes like this do to the human body?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lbg0ZBXnuZE

lmao - any particular story on how you first came across this song?

1/d * 1wk seems like a low threshold for problems

It's always been amazing to me that in the post-internet, pre-enshittification era of the Information age that people could go around confidently spouting bullshit facts like "gum stays in your body for 7 years" when a few swipes of a thumb can tell anyone with an internet connection otherwise.

Nowadays this doesn't hold as true, because search results / LLM's tend to give you the information it thinks that you want rather than what is actually the result. Have seen a lot of people getting into dumb, easily disprovable arguments and using a copy pasted google summary as evidence to whatever absurd claim they are making.

Given the prompt "Why does swallowing gum result in the gum staying in your body for 7 years?" Claude explains that that story is a myth, so maybe search is dead but GenAI isn't totally useless. Wikipedia also comments on it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chewing_gum#Choking_and_excret...

There are vast hundreds of millions to billions of people who don't watch the news and don't read books, get their information from social media and rumors, and don't know about authoritative primary sources or critical thinking.

After all, what else would explain populist authoritarians being so wildly popular almost globally at this time?

And maybe we need a social media platform that forbids plaintext and only allows fixed patterns of statements backed by citations from reputable sources only? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

About 750 million people are entirely illiterate as well (in any language). I think the actual number may be higher because I’ve worked with a surprising number of them across global oilfields.

um why don't they answer the real question: what happens if you swallow bubble gum?! 12-year old me needs to know.

Raise your hand if you read the topic wrong the first time.

No, but if you want to something about what happens when you swallow what you probably think it might have been misread as, the Straight Dope has some information on that [1].

[1] https://www.straightdope.com/21341232/how-many-calories-are-...

I read "a gun" and was wondering if it's really that many people that would warrant writing an article about it.

I read it as "a gun" in hindsight. Head to reread because that didn't make sense.

I'm assuming the GP's brain replaced the 'g' with a 'c'.

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